Ziyodullo Shahidi

The Foundation wrote its own account of him in English around 2004. It is the source from which most later English writing about him descends, including the encyclopedia entries, and it is better than anything written since. It opens like this:

After The Second World War, in 1946, a group of Tajik melodists entered Moscow Conservatory, but only one of them managed to graduate from that School of Music. He was Ziyodullo Shahidi (1914-1985). Merging maqam with symphony, he formalised modern Tajik music and became known as an outstanding figure of this form of synthesis. The reconciliation of different cultures as an idea goes back to the philosophy of Abu Ali Ibn Sina (born in Bukhara in 980), known in Europe as Avicenna.

What follows fills in around it.

Samarkand

Born 4 May 1914 in Samarkand — in the Russian empire then, in Uzbekistan now, and for centuries before either a Persian-speaking city of poets. His father Muqaddaskhon Shahidi was a musician, and the house was one where the shashmaqom was played and Firdausi, Rudaki, Hafiz and Jami were read aloud.

He overcame two crucial events in the culture of the region: the replacement of Arabic-based Farsi and Turkish by Cyrillic, and the persecution of intellectuals — his father, Muqaddaskhon Shahidi, was murdered during the Bolshevistic terror of 1937.

Sources differ on how his father died: one says arrest by the NKVD and death in prison six months later, another that he was shot. That he was killed in 1937 is not disputed.

The trade, then the training

He finished primary school in 1932 and taught. Until 1939 he worked as a musician in the theatres and radio studios of Tashkent, Samarkand and Stalinabad — the city that became Dushanbe — and he took part in setting up the modern theatres of Tashkent and Samarkand. From 1939 to 1952 he directed the song-and-dance ensemble of the Tajik State Philharmonic. He joined the Union of Composers of the Tajik SSR in 1940. Before 1941 he was known chiefly as a player of the gidjak.

Composition came late and formally: the studio of the Union of Composers with Alexander Lensky and Sergei Balasanyan from 1943, the Moscow Conservatory from 1946, the national studio completed in 1949, and the composition class of Vladimir Fere from 1952 to 1957. He was forty-three when he graduated. His early instrumental pieces — a Rondo of 1948, a “Concert for piano & violin” of 1949 — were, the Foundation says, “inspired by the search for new forms, styles, and expressions of modern music”.

The voice, and the radio

However, vocal art was his favoured form. Transforming the ideas of the classical poets Rudaki, Saadi Sherazi, and Hofiz into the modern musical sphere, and co-operating with contemporary poets such as Lohuti, Tursun-Zoda, Rahimi, Dehoti, he aimed to transform the liberty of their thoughts into a new musical style belonging to his own time. This feature of his art was an integral part of the radio music of that period, linking Tajiks, Uzbeks, Iranians, and Afghans of the 50s and 60s, and bringing them out from their political isolation.

More than three hundred songs and fourteen romances. Vatan, Sitorai man, Khonai mo, Zi suzi sina, Ey sorbon on words of Saadi. They were sung by Shoista Mullojonova, Hanifa Mavlonova, Muqaddas Nabieva and others, and they went into the gold fund of Tajik radio.

The argument he lost

He did not start out defending the classical tradition. Early on he declined to treat Tajik traditional music, shashmaqom included, as a professional art, and the position was argued in the press: on 6 May 1957 Tojikistoni Soveti printed a summing-up of the discussion on the development of Tajik music, subtitled “a reply to Z. Shahidi”.

He changed his position. From the second half of the 1960s he worked mainly in symphonic forms, and the works that changed his standing — Buzruk in 1972, the Symphony of Maqams in 1977 — are the works of the changed mind.

Ziyodullo Shahidi’s constant dream to transform maqams into symphony was realized during the early 50s, gradually changing his style of thinking and developing his musical identity. Driven by his enlightening character to draw the attention of his countrymen to symphonic thought, his composition was based on the interpretation of the original classical cycle Shashmaqom within the modern European harmony.

Public life

Chairman of the Union of Composers of the Tajik SSR from 1956 to 1960, the first Tajik to hold the post, arguing for European notation and polyphony against considerable resistance. Director of the Dushanbe music college in 1964–65. A deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR through four convocations, and a party member from 1950. He wrote in the press and spoke on radio and television about music constantly. His stated reason, in a Russian source of 1990: he was deeply convinced that a composer’s duty was not only to write music but to argue publicly for the best of it, and to take an active part in the education of ordinary listeners.

Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1957. People’s Artist of the Tajik SSR in 1964. The Rudaki State Prize, Tajikistan’s highest award in the arts, in 1984, the year before he died.

He died in Dushanbe on 25 February 1985 and is buried at Sari Osiyo.